Stephen Daisley is a Spectator regular and a columnist for the Scottish Daily Mail
Southside Central is the kind of ward Scottish Labour needs to be winning. It’s in Glasgow, home to significant pockets of deprivation within the Gorbals and Govanhill, and has a substantial population of Scots of Pakistani heritage. If there is a path to a Labour government after the 2026 Holyrood elections, it runs through communities
There are three thankless posts in a modern Labour government. There’s the Chancellor, who has to announce the tightening of belts and the hiking of taxes; the Home Secretary, who must busy themselves cracking down, banging up and throwing away the key; and the Work and Pensions Secretary, who is charged with Scroogeing every last
Here’s a political conundrum for you. You’re the SNP. You’ve been in power in Scotland since 2007. You’re 13 points ahead in the polls one year out from the next Holyrood election. You’ve been stumbling these past few years but you’ve finally found your feet again. Your leader is less divisive than his predecessors and
As Nicola Sturgeon announces that she is standing down from the Scottish parliament, it is worth reflecting on what a gilded political life she led – and how she managed to fritter it all away and leave frontline politics with no legacy, or at least none she’d care to be remembered by. The former Glasgow
Barely have they abandoned the sinking ship that is HMS Tory than right-wingers are finding their liferaft taking on water. Reform seemed unstoppable for a small while, often outpolling a Conservative party whose captain went to sea four months ago and hasn’t been heard from since. Now Rupert Lowe, its most prominent MP other than
‘There are judges in Jerusalem,’ Menachem Begin is reputed to have proclaimed, following a court ruling which he believed vindicated one of his policy positions. The phrase has been appropriated by critics of judicial reform and others keen to see Bagatz, the Israeli supreme court, remain a bulwark against illiberal overreach by the government. ‘There are judges
Everything they taught you in school is a lie. Carthage was not salted, Canute knew he couldn’t control the tide, Marie Antoinette never said ‘let them eat cake’, and Mrs O’Leary did not start the Great Chicago Fire. Yet the biggest fallacy of the best years of your life is peddled not by teachers but
The Trump-Zelensky summit is a geopolitical Rashomon. Some saw a lying, maniacal bully and his snarling sidekick berate a patriot for telling the truth about his nation’s attacker and refusing to surrender to him. Others witnessed a bratty ingrate haughtily shaking his begging bowl while dictating to his benefactors the terms on which he would
Every time the Palestinians rebuff a peace proposal, commentators reach for an observation by the Israeli diplomat Abba Eban: ‘The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.’ It’s pithy, and depressingly accurate, but I’ve always been more struck by another Eban aphorism: ‘Men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other
There is a perception that Scotland is a socialist basket case where a mammoth public sector is showered with English money, and I’m here to tell you that this perception is racist, offensive and… not entirely without foundation. The latest Scottish budget analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) examines public sector pay north
Sidney Low said that ‘government in England is government by amateurs’, and parliament seems to be doing its level best to vindicate that view. The Assisted Dying Bill being rushed through the Commons with sinister alacrity has exposed structural flaws in our legislative procedures, not least the vulnerability of private members’ bills to exploitation by
‘When the Lord returned the captives to Zion,’ Psalm 126 goes, ‘we were like dreamers. Our mouths were filled with laughter and our tongues with songs of joy.’ Watching the images of Alexander Troufanov, Sagui Dekel-Chen, and Iair Horn paraded by their captors after almost 500 days of torment, there was no laughter and not
In all the argle-bargle over Donald Trump’s proposal for Gaza, there have been countless questions about legality, morality and feasibility. Isn’t the population transfer he suggests tantamount to ethnic cleansing? On what legal basis would the United States assert sovereignty over Gaza and enter into contracts with developers and investors? How could a country that
Once you get beyond trade and maritime borders, you will find that much of international law is, pace Clausewitz, the continuation of policy by other means. The International Criminal Court (ICC) was continuing policy by other means when it issued arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant. The two stand
Turning around a government that has lost its way is one of the trickiest feats in politics, all the more so if that government has enjoyed a long stretch of incumbency. The big beasts are gone, everyone who’s left is exhausted, the voter coalition is coming apart, and some begin to question the party’s purpose
Rachel from accounts is settling up. In a speech at Siemens Healthineers near Oxford, the Chancellor signalled her commitment to development by backing a third runway at Heathrow, placing her on a collision course with net-zeroers, Nimbys and the other forces of decline. The interests ranged against her are mighty and loud, but if she
Should the Southport killer swing? Lee Anderson thinks so. The Reform MP posted an image of a noose on X, with the words: ‘No apologies here. This is what is required!’ It’s not the first time Anderson has backed the return of the rope, and not the first time I’ve contended that he’s wrong, but
Coulter’s Law, named after its originator, the right-wing polemicist Ann Coulter, holds that the longer it takes the authorities or the news media to identify the suspect in a terrorist attack or other notorious incident the less likely that suspect is to be white. Allow me to propose a British corollary to this rule: the
Since Franklin D. Roosevelt, every new US administration has been judged on its first hundred days, but it is in the first 24 hours, with a flurry of executive orders and memorandums, that a president sets the tone for the coming four years. The first 24 hours hint at nine themes that will define Donald
The Guardian reports that one in five voters under the age of 45 would prefer to do away with democracy and have an authoritarian strongman govern Britain. It’s almost touching that so many think Britain is still capable of being governed, but it’s concerning that a fifth of millennials and Gen Z have adopted the
